Obama Tossing Acting Head of BATFE Under the Bus?

Despite all the Watergate-like denials by government officials, I have no compunctions in naming Obama as the guiding force behind Project Gunrunner’s Operation Fast and Furious. In an obvious effort to introduce more gun control laws, it was Obama and his administration which first began falsely accusing reputable gun dealers of illegally selling weapons to Mexican drug cartels. It only makes sense that Obama needed to back up his false accusations by actually permitting weapons to slip in under the border.

Do you know what the biggest difference between the Watergate coverup and this recent Operation Fast and Furious coverup? No one got killed during Watergate:

There’s a war along the Mexican border all right, but it’s not necessarily the one you’re thinking of. In fact, this one has spread all the way to the halls of Congress.

This week, the Obama administration is expected to fire Kenneth Melson, the acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — tossing him under the bus as a symbolic gesture to a congressional committee headed by Rep. Daryl Issa (R-Calif.).

Issa’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is investigating an insane ATF operation — a supposed sting that involved the deliberate funneling of thousands of weapons to ultra-violent Mexican drug cartels in 2009-10.

The op’s name, “Fast and Furious,” came from the series of movies about an undercover drag racer working for the FBI — which gives you some idea of the lack of seriousness behind this cockamamie scam.

The Justice Department, which oversees the ATF, says the idea was to allow the sale of handguns, AK-47s and .50 caliber rifles to so-called “straw purchasers,” who’d then pass them along to the cartels. In theory, ATF agents would then trace the extent of the smuggling networks in an effort to stop the illegal cross-border gun trade.

Oops No 1: The agency had no real way to trace the guns once they left the country — and no real power to operate in Mexico.

Oops No. 2: The gangs used the weapons for what you’d expect. At least two American agents have been killed with Fast and Furious guns. God knows how many Mexicans have died; since 2006, more than 40,000 have died in the drug wars.

The operation was vehemently opposed within the Phoenix Field Division of the ATF, where the scheme originated. Agent Pete Forcelli testified: “What we have here is a colossal failure of leadership. We weren’t giving guns to people for killing bear, we were giving guns to people to kill other humans.”

Issa and his Senate counterpart, Charles Grassley, accuse Melson of being intimately involved in the details of the operation, and claim Attorney General Eric Holder is stonewalling their investigation. “Despite mounting evidence to the contrary, DOJ continues to deny that Operation Fast and Furious was ill-conceived and had deadly consequences,” they wrote in their June 14 report. Holder says he never knew about Fast and Furious.

Is anyone surprised that Eric Holder is hindering yet another investigation in order to protect Obama? I didn’t think so.

Even if Melson winds up the only scapegoat, it’s clear the operation fit with the thinking of this administration. With the Mexican president standing beside him in 2009, President Obama claimed that “more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.”

The claim nicely makes the porous border a two-way issue — drugs coming here, guns going there. Mexico’s been pushing the complaint for years, and gun-hating American liberals eat it up.

Problem is, there’s no evidence. As the independent FactCheck.org noted, Obama’s assertion isn’t supported by government statistics: “The figure represents only the percentage of crime guns that have been submitted by Mexican officials and traced by US officials.” That is, most of the guns the Mexicans asked us to ID were American.

FactCheck “can find no hard data on the total number of guns actually ‘recovered in Mexico.’ ” Others have put the number of American guns used in Mexican crimes as low as 17 percent.

Fast and Furious was supposed to prove the theory. That is, the administration “knew” who the bad guys were — legitimate gun dealers in the Southwest — and set out to make them the heavies in a phony sting operation.

But both political parties are behind the larger mess. A powerful collation of open-borders advocates, employers and civil-rights ideologues have conspired to keep the border porous — and screamed “racism” at any who disagree.

Last year, Janet Napolitano — former Arizona governor and current Homeland Security chief — cheerfully admitted that the long-promised “virtual fence” of towers, cameras, ground sensors and radar is an expensive sham. Billions were wasted on something that few in the government ever saw as more than a pretense of action to shut the critics up.

In the meantime, ranchers have been shot and property trashed, and the lives of Border Patrol and ICE agents have been snuffed out in the line of duty.

The Issa hearings are just scratching the surface of a larger scandal — Washington’s consistent, bipartisan refusal to fulfill its constitutional duty to secure the country’s borders.

3 Comments on “Obama Tossing Acting Head of BATFE Under the Bus?”

“President Obama claimed that “more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our shared border.”

The government despises competition.
Small time gun shops are nothing compared to the weapons deals involving China, France, Russia, the US, and the UK, who just so happen to also be the UN’s permanent 5.

The pillagers exporting guns to historical pillagers and then blaming the historical non pillagers for disrupting the pillaging. Its a pillagers world right now, the question is, how long are we going to put up with it? I’ve about had it with all these Spaniard family of nations blaming us for anything at all, they need to reflect, on who they are, where they came from and what they did and continue to do still to this day. Must we have another crusade this time with Americans leading the charge for a second time? Perhaps. In the years after WWII Nazis trying to flee, US, found refuge down south, well, south of North America at least.